@Lens I could see what you mean by absurd but my intention wasn't to get rid of Mario just have it lumped together so there would be a tag. So if a new player chose to run Mario they would have nothing stopping them but it would obviously be slower. However, even if we did require people to only play Luigi there is kind of a precedent of that with Luigi's Mansion speedruns. I know this because I'm trying to go through a save file atm...

@ShadowLugia I feel like you didn't really read some parts because I did address your first issue. The second I acknowledged as fact as to why Mario and Luigi are split. What I think you didn't realize was what I was trying to do with that argument. I used what I think is the biggest issue for the people that don't want the split and applied it to Mario and Luigi. That issue being that they are pretty much the same run and surprise it works. You even said yourself that the point of speedrunning is to go fast so the inherent time argument doesn't make sense. That time save in the beginning of the run should be welcomed.

So before reading all of these posts I started out as someone who really didn't care if the split happened or not. This is even with me most likely not wanting to run 2p mostly because I find it silly.

After I reading everything I was initially pro no split and while trying to logic everything for that argument I'm split. So what follows is probably an argument for both sides...

Currently we have Mario and Luigi as subcategories for Any% and 120 stars. Now what are the differences between the two that constituted that split that no one argues about. First is the obvious lack of cut scenes in the first approximately 10 mins of the game. However, for the sake of this argument lets say we could easily consider the start of the game being on finishing talking to the bunny in gateway and starting with 0 starbits. So what are the differences after that? Luigi has stats that allow him to do a couple of tricks that Mario can't do and be faster. Luigi also has some negatives but we're also going to ignore that. So if you were to race people of similar skill levels Luigi most if not all of the time would win. There are no other differences. However, what is clearly the case is that you're essentially doing the same thing in each run. The differences warrant a split which no one complains about. So using the argument of lumping 1p and 2p together because the objective is to complete the game the fastest I could also argue that we should get rid of the Mario category because Mario will always be slower than Luigi. Almost every argument for lumping 1p and 2p can be applied to the Mario and Luigi logic. I mostly say this because I don't want to go through every one.

There is another argument were there are tricks that a lot of players don't do because they are harder that is similar but I don't really feel like going through that..

Now basically that was reasoning for splitting 1p and 2p however, despite all that I think the leaderboard should remain the same. Basically because of what Demolition14 and frogyfro said also I have no idea why splitting them would make you want to run both. If anything you would want to be running 2p now because its faster. However, I'm also totally up for getting rid of the Mario category and it be all Luigi!